WinOps 2017

21st-22nd of September 2017

Register to our meetup to stay up to date, and also join our mailing list.

About

The world’s only dedicated conference to 'Windows in a DevOps World'.

The conference was about discovering and sharing experiences of using products and tools within the
Microsoft DevOps world such as: PowerShell, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy, Azure, Vagrant, Chocolatey,
AppDynamics, ScriptRock, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Docker etc...

Event Partner

Platinum Sponsor

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Lanyard Sponsor

Keynote Speaker

Jeffrey Snover is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the Chief Architect for the Enterprise
Cloud Group which includes Azure Stack, Windows Server, System Center and Operations
Management Suite.

Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell, an object-based distributed
automation engine, scripting language, and command line shell. Snover joined Microsoft in
1999 as divisional architect for the Management and Services Division, providing technical
direction across Microsoft's management technologies and products.

Snover has over 30 years of industry experience with a focus on management technologies and
solutions. He was an architect in the office of the CTO at Tivoli and a development manager
at NetView. He has worked also as a consulting engineer and development manager at DEC,
where he led various network and systems management projects.

Snover is a frequent speaker at industry and research conferences on a variety of cloud,
management and language topics.

Speakers

Ed Wilson is the Microsoft Scripting Guy and a well-known scripting expert. He writes the
daily Hey
Scripting Guy! blog. He is a member of the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS)
team and has launched the new OMS Team
blog. He has also spoken at
TechEd and at the Microsoft internal TechReady conferences.

He was the instigator for the popular PowerShell Saturday community conferences. He has
written more than a 15 books including 12 on Windows scripting that were published by
Microsoft Press. He has also contributed to nearly a dozen other books. His newest book by
Microsoft Press is Windows PowerShell Step by Step 3rd edition. Ed holds more than 20
industry certifications, including Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and Certified
Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). Prior to coming to work for Microsoft, he
was a senior consultant for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner where he specialized in
Active Directory design and Exchange implementation. Scripting Guy will also be bringing
Teresa, Scripting Wife who is also a PowerShell MVP!

I am a former Microsoft PowerShell MVP now Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP. I serve as the treasurer
for PowerShell.org. I was the cofounder and admin assistant for the Charlotte PowerShell User Group until
we moved to Gainesville FL. I work with people in the Windows PowerShell Community to start user groups in
different cities. I have been on the leadership team for all the PowerShell Saturday events that have been
held in the USA. I guest blog on the Hey Scripting Guy page and was named an Honorary Scripting Guy for my
contributions. I was named PowerShell Hero by the PowerShell Community in Jan 2014 for my contributions.
My passion is to help people find the resources they need to learn and grow their PowerShell knowledge.

Michael Greene is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft in the Enterprise Cloud Group division. Michael
is the PowerShell & DevOps lead for the CAT team (Customers, Architecture, and Technology). He drives
customer feedback in the areas of management and automation, creates content to improve the customer
experience, and provides a connection to engineering for projects that are adopting new products and
technologies. Previously he worked in Office 365 operations where he gained experience using PowerShell to
manage environments at cloud scale.

Iris ClassonKonstrukt

Software developer

Iris Classon is a passionate software developer and sought-after speaker. She is known for her ability to
explain complex concepts in a simplified and engaging manner. As a before this clinical dietitian and
fitness fanatic she knows everything about accelerated learning as proven by her rapid career advancement
as a developer, author and trainer.

Her life is very much about contributing to the developer community, as well as being an eternal student
striving towards pragmatic perfection in programming.

Richard Siddaway

PowerShell MVP

I have been working with Microsoft technologies for over 25 years having spent time in most IT roles. I
have been interested in automation techniques for that whole time – DevOps is the current cumulation of
that thinking. PowerShell caught my interest when I first heard about it and I have been using it since
the early beta versions. I am a multi-year PowerShell MVP. I have given numerous talks on PowerShell at
various events in the UK, Europe and the USA. I have written two PowerShell books: PowerShell in Practice
(Manning 2010) and PowerShell and WMI (Manning 2012) and co-authored PowerShell in Depth (Manning 2013,
2015) and PowerShell Deep Dive (Manning 2013). An introductory book on managing Active Directory
(including the use of PowerShell) – Learn Active Directory in a Month of Lunches was published by Manning
in 2014. I’m currently working on the third edition of PowerShell in Action with Bruce Payette.

Richard Fennell is the the Engineering Director of the Black Marble Ltd, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in
the North of England. As well as being responsible for the delivery of systems and tools used by Black
Marble, he also consults with clients of all sizes in the area of ALM & DevOps processes .

He is a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM (nee Team System), an ALM Ranger, a Typemock MVP, a Certified
Scrum Master, a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and a Chartered Engineer (CEng).

Elton is a Microsoft MVP, Docker Captain and Pluralsight Author. He has worked in IT since 2000, primarily
as an Architect connecting systems using Microsoft technologies, although in recent years he has found a
lot of value in going cross-platform with Linux.

In his current role, Elton is working with a client who are transitioning to a DevOps culture. Their goal
is to build a smooth, fast pipeline from business requirement to delivered product. Elton is helping to
deliver that with a focus on simplifying the infrastructure landscape, empowering development to provision
and own their environments, and automating every stage of delivery.

Chris O’Dell has developed software with Microsoft technologies for over 10 years. Between 2012 and 2014,
she led the API team at 7digital, a leading provider of music streaming services worldwide; she currently
works on the platform engineering team at JUST EAT in London. In all of her roles she has promoted
practices we now know as Continuous Delivery, including TDD, version control, and Continuous Integration.
Chris is co-author, with Matthew Skelton, of the book "Continuous Delivery with Windows and .Net" and a
contributor to the book "Build Quality In".

Amy Harms is an engineering leader focused on service delivery and reliability. She has led technical
teams through service design and implementation to BAU & continuous delivery with a focus on Agile,
security and DevOps. With a background in SaaS and enterprise software, she brings real life expertise
that focuses on the "live-site first" mentality required to make a service successful with the commercial
insight into the business factors that drive the service.

Most recently, Amy has been focused on redesigning and improving a continuous integration/delivery
pipeline, implementing an incident management framework to drive a "live site first" culture, and
producing a healthy service-scaled, PaaS platform capable of leveraging big data for advanced business
intelligence and market competitiveness and meeting strict international security standards and compliance
frameworks, e.g. SOX and PCI DSS.

Matteo Emili is a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM since 2010. Former Microsoft Student Partner
(youngest ever in Italy and the first ever in being both MSP and MVP, in 2010 at the age of 19), his
experience spreads from Universities, going through small businesses to the largest worldwide enterprises.

His focus on software engineering tied with business processes led him to have a deep knowledge of
different topics and technologies, from development to virtualization, and he has a passion for Agile
Methodologies, Processes and all the techie stuff around the code, which leads him to always searching for
something new to share with the worldwide community around the Application Lifecycle Management and DevOps
fields.

He currently works for Dell Software as an Application Lifecycle Management advisor.

The journey began as a developer working for a range of organisations from enterprises to startups. Steve
has been doing this "DevOps" stuff for a number of years now helping clients deliver their software more
effectively.

Steve strongly believes in the motto "culture eats strategy for breakfast" and how its important to keep
measuring your cultural shift to make sure you do not do more harm than good to your organisation
throughout a transformation.

Gael ColasSynEdgy

Cloud Automation Architect

Gael Colas is a Cloud and Automation consultant based in London, UK, and fervent DevOps enthusiast. He has
an extended experience in Infrastructure Operations for Financial Services, supporting critical platforms,
with tight security constraints.

Although from a networking background, he went briefly through development, Unix administration, Windows
and third-party applications administration before falling in love with PowerShell and automating as much
as possible. Currently, Gael is at the service of a European Cloud Provider to develop PaaS and IaaS
solutions.

Ryan has always had a passion for process automation and started with PowerShell in 2013 to automate a
repetitive IT Support task with SharePoint and has not looked back since.

As the Co-ordinator of Get-PSUGUK (www.get-psuguk.org) – the UK PowerShell User Groups and a recent
awardee of the Microsoft MVP for Cloud and Datacentre Management - Ryan gets to see first-hand just how
useful and powerful PowerShell can be and this allows him to bring this experience to Re-Digitise to
deliver bespoke training, guidance and consultancy to organisations on how they can make the most of
PowerShell, both with On-Premises or Cloud Hosted Infrastructure.

You can find more about Re-Digitise at www.re-digitise.org and Ryan’s Blog.

Organising Committee

While culture and sharing are at the heart of DevOps, Infrastructure Automation is the technical backbone.
That’s one of the reasons why Hannah co-founded Pendrica, a consultancy specialising in Platform
Automation with Chef and Microsoft.

Hannah’s background and experience in managing large scale software programmes naturally lead to a keen
interest in Agile, Continuous Delivery and the DevOps movement as a way of building collaborative,
highly-performing teams. As a coach and mentor she continues this work today, helping teams improve how
they work together in the fast-moving world of automation.

Outside of work you can generally find Hannah in her local pub enjoying a craft beer while planning her
next adventure.

I have worked in developer teams, an operations team, and been a generalist shipping software for JUST EAT
since 2010 (with a few years doing that elsewhere first). I've lived through cultural and technological
change and played a role in effecting it. I had a pivotal role in migrating our platform from a datacentre
to the AWS cloud - consequently, we now do tens of deployments a week compared to a tens a year. I've
automated systems, tests, servers, and in some cases myself. I've touched many parts of the platform and
delude myself that I do an OK job at that.

Marcus Robinson is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft working with technologies such as Windows Server
and Microsoft Azure. Marcus travels the country discussing DevOps practices with the IT community.

Prior to working with Microsoft Marcus split his time between running a managed IT services provider,
delivering enterprise infrastructure consultancy and being an instructor and course author for Learning
Tree International.

Joining Microsoft provided the ideal opportunity for Marcus to focus on what he enjoys - working with and
talking about the latest Microsoft technologies.

Steve Thair co-founded DevOpsGuys in 2013 after a 20+ year career in IT infrastructure and
operations to help organisations simplify the management of their online applications by
leveraging DevOps practices to improve the delivery, performance and time-to-market of the
entire software development pipeline.

Steve Blogs extensively on DevOps at http://blog.devopsguys.com/
and has presented at numerous meetups, webinars and conference to evangelise the benefits of
DevOps. You can see some of those presentation on Slideshare here.

He also started the London Web Performance meetup and launched WebPerfDays London in
conjunction with VelocityConf to help “speed up the web”. He has been on the organising
committee for the Web Performance track for Velocity EU for the past 3 years and has
presented at VelocityConf on web performance.

Alex is the co-founder of Prism Digital and heads up the DevOps and Infrastructure recruitment division.
He is a proud co-founder and co-organiser of the WinOps Conference and Meetup group. He is a firm believer
in promoting technology, community and sharing within the world of tech recruitment.

He wants to establish Prism as the UK’s leading DevOps recruitment consultancy.

To the cloud! From on-prem to multi-tenancy

Forrester Research predicted a sixfold increase in the cloud computing market by
2020. With all its promises and possibilities even the smallest of systems is
tempted to make the move to the cloud from on-prem. While there are plenty of
numbers and predictions, the stories are often left untold as some companies
struggle growing up and becoming high cloud maturity companies. In this session
one of these stories will be shared,- a small Swedish startup moving from an
on-prem single tenant SOA system to an Azure Cloud multi-tenant solution. A
small team, many firsts, a limited budget, promises made and contracts signed,
I’ll walk you through the (work in progress) architecture and how we got there.
The discussions, solutions, limitations and possibilities we encountered, put in
the perspective of the cloud maturity research done by the Economist
Intelligence unit last year. A tiny star on a big horizon, to the cloud!

Break
10:50-11:00am (10 mins)

Configuration management at scale, even with PowerShell and PowerShell DSC, can
quickly become complicated, error-prone, and unruly. The new Desired State
Configuration (DSC) feature of Azure Automation, in the Microsoft’s Operations
Management Suite, provides a solution - a central, secure location for all your
PowerShell DSC items and reports, that is scalable, reliable, and
highly-available. Come learn how it can transform configuration management
across your organization, using the PowerShell tools and knowledge you already
have.

There are benefits to be gained when patterns and practices from developer
techniques are applied to operations. Notably, a fully automated solution where
infrastructure is managed as code and all changes are automatically validated
before reaching production. This is a process shift that is recognized among
industry innovators. For organizations already leveraging these processes, it
should be clear how to leverage Microsoft platforms. For organizations that are
new to the topic, it should be clear how to bring this process to your
environment and what it means to your organizational culture. This presentation
explains the components of a Release Pipeline for configuration as code, the
value to operations, and solutions that are used when designing a new Release
Pipeline architecture.

Lunch
12:55-2:00pm (1 hour)

Community Road Show Sessions

Windows 2016 provides two new options for delivering infrastructure and
therefore applications - Nano server and Containers (Windows or Hyper-V). In
this session you'll learn how to use PowerShell to automate the lifecycle
management of these new options and how to integrate them into your devops
driven environment.

This session is for anyone needing to understand what nano server and containers
can do for them and needing to learn how to manage these infrastructure options.

Attendees will learn the differences and similarities between nano server and
more 'traditional' options and gain and understanding of how containers can be
best utilised on a Windows platform. They will also see live demonstrations of
working with these objects and have the code used in the demo made available as
a take away

Panel Sessions

Configuration Management Theory: Why idempotence and immutability?

We'll discover the reasons why it is a risky bet to not *aim* to manage infrastructure and its
configuration with idempotence and immutability at heart.

Sharing real world experience, we'll see why configurations should not be done by humans (it's like
playing Djenga), and why what may work at the beginning does not work over a long period of time or
scale (pet vs cattle problem).

Break
3:40-3:55pm (15 mins)

The quick rise of Continuous Delivery in the enterprise means that common
problems are often approached the other way round. Concepts like Feature Flags
and Testing In Production caused several headaches to developers and QA
engineers, especially where they have a wealth of experience about traditional
development.

There are some challenges and approaches which are very common, and they still
scare newcomers. Let's have a look at a few of these, with the most common
solutions.

DoS yourself in production every night to prove you can take it

At JUST EAT, we haven't had an embarrassing performance regression that we
haven't noticed and put right on the same day we deployed it - for over two
years now. We also haven't been taken down by unexpected load.

We have around 150 engineers deploying tens of times a week across around 120
different components in production. In 2014, we pushed more than 800 discrete
changes and coped with around 50% more traffic as we grew. Our uptime has… gone
up.

We don't ​​have engineers run a performance test before we release have
engineers run capacity tests every month or so when we remember to Instead, we
do something a bit different...

Wednesday May 25th 2016

What’s new in Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Join Ed Wilson, The Scripting Guy and Marcus Robinson, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft on a FREE hands-on
workshop designed to help you learn how to evolve your datacentre into a true hybrid cloud model to achieve
greater efficiency, flexibility and scalability. Attend this deep technical event and learn how to deliver a
true hybrid IT infrastructure without sacrificing security, control, or reliability. Take advantage of the
powerful capabilities in Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft Azure.